Protesters demonstrate against Brett Kavanaugh in front of the US supreme court court in Washington on 28 September.
Photograph: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images

The US supreme court is best known, in the modern era, for its landmark 1973 ruling in the case of Roe v Wade, which upheld a woman’s legal right to an abortion. That may have changed last week. The case of Ford v Kavanaugh, fought out before the judiciary committee of the US Senate, in front of a riveted national audience, provided both a dramatic spectacle worthy of Hollywood and a startling insight into the travails and traumas of contemporary American life. It is not over yet. And neither will it soon be forgotten.

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Ford v Kavanaugh is more than a dispute about a serious sexual assault that allegedly occurred one evening 36 years ago. It is more than a mere human tragedy, although the Senate hearing, at times brutal and searing, will undoubtedly leave both individuals wounded and scarred. It was about much more than the constant, never-mitigated tensions between the sexes that are as old as the world itself.

This clash, nominally over Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve as a justice in the highest US court, embodies and symbolises the stark cultural divisions weakening, disfiguring and confounding a country that, increasingly unconvincingly, still calls itself the United States. It is about politics, it is about power and the law, it is about gender equality and it is about mutual trust and respect, without which any relationship, let alone a sprawling, intimately connected country of 325 million people, cannot hope to thrive.

Take trust first. The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford was utterly compelling. She said she was “terrified” and she looked it. But throughout her ordeal, she remained dignified, calm and brave. The details were hard to hear. They must have been much harder to recount. Ford showed herself to be an entirely credible witness, a woman with no motive in coming forward other than the fulfilment of what she called her civic duty, a duty that has come at immense cost to herself.

The contrast presented by Kavanaugh was telling. His angry, entitled, self-pitying pleading did not suggest a temperament suited to the role of supreme court justice. His answers were often evasive, aggressive and downright rude when, for example, he was asked about excessive drinking and drunken blackouts. When he waxed angry, fuming about a conspiracy by the “left” and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons”, he seemed to be deliberately aping Donald Trump and appealing, like a politician, to Trump’s support base.

Kavanaugh was coy about an obvious sexual innuendo contained in his high-school yearbook. He claimed witnesses present when the alleged assault took place had “said it didn’t happen”, when in fact he and his allies have refused to allow those witnesses to be interrogated publicly. Kavanaugh failed to explain why he does not support the usual practice of holding an FBI inquiry, which in theory could clear his name. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s senior Democrat, said such slippery, belligerent behaviour by a candidate for high office was “unbelievable”. That is the word that best sums him up.

While Kavanaugh failed the trust test, the politics were on his side. Feinstein was right when she said the Republican majority was determined to push through his nomination, whatever Ford said. Her testimony unnerved them briefly. But when Kavanaugh came back fighting, they jumped at the chance to ditch fairness, impartiality and good judgment, falling back instead on clannish party prejudice and visceral emotion.

Only at the very last minute did the second thoughts of a lone Republican senator force the committee to accept a limited FBI inquiry into “current, credible allegations”, thereby delaying a final, full Senate vote by a week. Even so, this looks like a placatory sop to critics. It seems unlikely that investigators can discover anything definitive in so short a time. At present, the odds still favour Kavanaugh.

It is no excuse to say the midterm elections are imminent. Such blatant partisanship cannot be justified with cynical claims that it was always thus. The founding fathers envisaged a Senate of 100 wise, experienced and independent individuals, not a cowardly gang of party hacks, sycophants and Trump imitators. If the Republicans succeed in confirming Kavanaugh, their crowing may be short lived. The standing of the supreme court may be critically undermined. And the voters are watching. Many, perhaps most, are deeply unimpressed.

This travesty has vividly exposed the unedifying truth of how, everywhere, women who stand up to power and speak out for justice still get mistreated and maligned. There was the sense that Ford was on trial. There was the fact that the Republican senators – uniformly white and male and rightly wary of their own innate chauvinism – employed a female prosecutor to speak for them. There was the shameful truth that they could not look Ford in the eye and thank her for her testimony. Calls to the US national sexual assault helpline spiked during the hearing. But what was the not so subliminal, dinosaur message from the Republicans? For Me Too, read Screw You.

Ford’s actions last week were inspirational and heroic. But in terms of gender equality and respect for all, there is still a long, long way to go. Consider how the world would have reacted if the demeanours of the two adversaries had been reversed. What if it had been she who ranted and raved last Thursday and he who had spoken calmly and factually? No prizes for the answer. The world would have dismissed Ford as an unstable, hysterical accuser – and declared Kavanaugh a wronged man. Unbelievable.